In livestock feeding operations, it is often the case that thousands of pounds of feed must be mixed together, and the resulting feed is then supplied to different enclosures or pens of livestock. Feed that is consumed by livestock is often composed of many different components, such as hay, oats, and corn, as well as other elements important to livestock diets such as minerals and other nutrients that are essential to healthy growth.
Due to the machinery needed to transport and combine these components in such quantities, it is often difficult to discern with precision how much of each component has been added to a feed mixer. For example, a desired ration may consist of 33% corn, 40% hay, and 27% oats. If a feeding of 4000 lbs. of such a ration to cattle is needed, one needs to load 1333 lbs. of corn into the feed mixer. A feed mixer is typically affixed with a scale, and an operator manning loading machinery must read the scale to know how many pounds are in the mixer in order to determine when to stop loading. This is an inefficient process that often produces an unbalanced ration, and lower end results. If the feeding mixture is not correct, livestock may go off feed, resulting in reduced weight gain and lower profit for producers. A real-time approach to tracking the amount of each component loaded into mixing equipment to ensure that livestock health and growth is maintained and efficiently managed is therefore missing in the current technology.
In addition, the supply chain for enabling feedlot workflows depends at least in part on temporal efficiencies for making sure each machine and each person in the process has an accurate understanding of the contents of a feed ration, and when activities are needed to be performed. For example, the operation of different machines in the process of preparing and mixing the desired ration of the example above need to be coordinated so that loading equipment is properly loaded with the right amount and type of feed component at the right time. Additionally, any additives in the feed ration must be prepared in the necessary amount, quantity of each component, temperature, brand/product name, etc. In the existing art, there is no current method of ensuring that machines and persons in the supply chain for such workflows is fully synchronized and integrated based on collected feed ration data and using asynchronous capture, processing and adaptability of real-time livestock ration weight information.